Court rules against minority districts

Posted Mon, March 9th, 2009 9:27 am by Lyle Denniston

Dividing 5-4, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that federal voting rights law does not require the creation of a new legislative district when that would include a racial minority group that has less than 50 percent of the population, as a remedy when minority voters’ rights have been diluted. Only when a group of minority voters would form a majority in a single-member district must it be created as a remedy under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Court ruled in Bartlett v. Strickland (07-689).

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion decided the case, but spoke for only three of the Court’s members; he was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, supported only the result, arguing that “vote dilution” claims of any kind simply are not allowed under the 1965 law.

Kennedy’s plurality opinion did say that, if state legislatures wished to create a district when a minority group would have less than a 50 percent majority, federal law does not forbid that. That is usually considered a “crossover district” because minorities, while not having a majority, are able to attract enough white voters’ support to elect their preferred candidates.

Still, Kennedy went on, the Court was not saying that legislatures could pass a law that would “entrench” a majority district in which minorities dominate; that would raise constitutional problems of its own, the opinion said.

The decision was one of four the Court released on Monday before beginning a two-week recess. Here in summary are the outcomes in the other cases:

** By a 7-2 vote, the Court ruled that a state is not responsible for the delays in getting a criminal case to a trial, if those delays are the result of tactics or omissions by public defender lawyers. Just because a court-appointed lawyer is from a public defender’s office, the Court said, does not make those attorneys government actors, as such, for whom the state is responsible for their tactical choices. Assigned counsel’s blame for delays are to be attributed to the defense, not the state — unless there is a complete breakdown in the public defender system, the Court decided in Vermont v. Brillon (08-88). Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the Court.

** Over four partial dissenting votes, the Court ruled that a firm seeking to compel arbitration of a dispute may take the case to a federal District Court only if the underlying controversy could have been litigated in federal court. A federal court has no jurisdiction, Justice Ginsburg wrote for the Court, to order arbitration of “a slice of a controversy when the controversy as a whole” would be beyond its reach. The ruling came in a dispute over a claimed failure of a consumer to pay a credit card balance (Vaden v. Discover Bank, 07-773).

** Ruling unanimously, the Court decided that the $40 per day fee for witnesses in regular federal court proceedings also applies when witnesses are summoned to appear in a case under the Court’s Original jurisdiction. The ruling, written by Justice Alito, rejected a challenge by the state of Kansas to a special master’s fee decision in a long-running dispute with Colorado over water rights in the Arkansas River. (The case is Kansas v. Colorado, 105 Original.)

On Friday the justices will meet for their March 23 conference; our "petitions to watch" for that conference will be available soon.

Major Cases

Trump v. Hawaii(1) Whether the respondents’ challenge to the president’s suspension of entry of aliens abroad is justiciable; (2) whether the proclamation – which suspends entry, subject to exceptions and case-by-case waivers, of certain categories of aliens abroad from eight countries that do not share adequate information with the United States or that present other risk factors – is a lawful exercise of the president’s authority to suspend entry of aliens abroad; (3) whether the global injunction barring enforcement of the proclamation’s entry suspensions worldwide, except as to nationals of two countries and as to persons without a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States, is impermissibly overbroad; and (4) whether the proclamation violates the establishment clause of the Constitution.

Gill v. Whitford(1) Whether the district court violated Vieth v. Jubelirer when it held that it had the authority to entertain a statewide challenge to Wisconsin's redistricting plan, instead of requiring a district-by-district analysis; (2) whether the district court violated Vieth when it held that Wisconsin's redistricting plan was an impermissible partisan gerrymander, even though it was undisputed that the plan complies with traditional redistricting principles; (3) whether the district court violated Vieth by adopting a watered-down version of the partisan-gerrymandering test employed by the plurality in Davis v. Bandemer; (4) whether the defendants are entitled, at a minimum, to present additional evidence showing that they would have prevailed under the district court's test, which the court announced only after the record had closed; and (5) whether partisan-gerrymandering claims are justiciable.

Carpenter v. United StatesWhether the warrantless seizure and search of historical cellphone records revealing the location and movements of a cellphone user over the course of 127 days is permitted by the Fourth Amendment.

Conference of March 16, 2018

Blatt, Hasenmiller, Leibsker & Moore, LLC v. Oliva (1) Whether good faith reliance on controlling circuit precedent, prior to any retroactive change in that law, is an unintentional “bona fide error” and a procedure “reasonably adapted to avoid error” within the meaning of the “bona fide error” defense in the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1692k(c); and (2) whether the due process clause prohibits punishment for conduct that was lawful when committed, but later prohibited by a retroactive change of law.

All Nippon Airways v. Wortman (1) Whether the filed-rate doctrine—which the Supreme Court firmly established in Keogh v. Chicago & Northwest Railway Co. and reaffirmed in Square D Co. v. Niagara Frontier Tariff Bureau, Inc.—still applies where rates are filed with a federal agency pursuant to a statutory regulatory scheme (as held by the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 1st, 2nd, and 7th Circuits), or whether it no longer applies to such rates if a court finds the agency lacks sufficient “practical ability” to regulate those rates (as held by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit below); and (2) whether, and to what extent, the filed-rate doctrine applies where a federal agency retains regulatory authority over rates, but chooses to exercise that authority by establishing a regulatory system, which it periodically revisits and revises, that does not require each rate to be literally filed with the agency.

Gonzalez-Badillo v. United States Whether, upon obtaining general consent to search a bag or other area, law enforcement may, consistent with the Fourth Amendment, “pry open” or otherwise cause intentional damages to personal property found within that might reasonably hold the object of the search.

Pioneer Centres Holding Company Stock Ownership Plan and Its Trustees v. Alerus Financial, N.A. Whether a plaintiff bears the full burden of establishing loss causation under 29 U.S.C. § 1109(a), which allows an employee plan to recover for “any losses to the plan resulting from [a fiduciary's] breach of its duties” under ERISA, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 6th, 9th, 10th, and 11th Circuits have held, or whether the burden shifts to the fiduciary to establish the absence of loss causation once the beneficiary makes a prima facie case by establishing breach of fiduciary duty and associated loss, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 8th Circuits have held.

Starr International Company, Inc. v. United States Whether a private party with Article III standing may be barred from asserting constitutional claims for money damages against the federal government because of the equitable doctrine of “third-party prudential standing.”